Eastwood in three films
Man High Plains
With: Clint Eastwood, Verna Bloom, Marianna Hill
Produced by his company, Malpaso -, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter is a fascinating film copyright. Become his own director and signing for the first time a Western, Eastwood begins by referring to the works of Sergio Leone to help get rid of this cumbersome analogy. The stranger who arrives in Lago, taciturn, sniper and unshaven, like the characters priori Eastwood played under the direction of Italian director. The resemblance ends there, and Eastwood leaves carefully hovering doubt on the identity of the rider alone. Is he the brother of Duncan? Is it the ghost of the latter, who, having cursed the inhabitants of Lago, returns to avenge them? Is the angel of death himself came to Lago to remind everyone's responsibility in the murder of Duncan? [Unlike the original, more ambiguous, the French version states, in the end, the FJ is the brother of Sheriff Duncan]. Lago is also itself a strange city. Eastwood was built by fifty-six workers during eighteen days on the shores of Mono Lake, in northern California,
a lake renowned for its water ten times saltier than the sea of actors and technicians have lived through the shooting at the edge of the lake, carrying out strictly following the script, which ends with the burning of most homes of the city. Hence the obligation to stage in continuity.
The arrival of the Stranger will change the habits of this small town whose population is composed only of adults - we do not see children - linked together by a collective criminal responsibility. Violating the one that caused, affecting an attitude weary face Belding's wife, the Stranger will humiliate the people he despises, without stripping them they can say anything and doing their scapegoat dwarf the sheriff of the place. As if the will of the destroying angel was not obvious enough, it will force them to paint their town red, the naming itself "Hell". Having killed his opponents whipping, hanging and Pistol, the Stranger will leave as he came in a mysterious halo. The unmarked grave in which lies the tortured body of Sheriff Duncan has a name ...
Playing on both the originality of the decor - each wall Lugo each house could be moved as required by the shooting - on the beauty of photography of Bruce Surtees, also adept at highlighting the red flames of the houses that destroy them at the end, and music - voluntarily and falsely inspired by Ennio Morricone,
Eastwood handles the humor and derision (dwarf and promoting dialogue between the Foreign and Mrs. Belding be seen), and fear the rise of violence, without ever indulging in the latter always justified and necessary. Rewriting the subject in its own way - the train whistle three times - the man alone, betrayed by a city and facing powerless, yet alone, in the off-the-law he wanted, the future filmmaker turns Pale Rider here the most troubling parable, a parable whose story is highlighted in red blood.
Patrick Brion.
During the kidnapping of a young boy by two escaped, one of two men discovered a paternal fiber.
a lake renowned for its water ten times saltier than the sea of actors and technicians have lived through the shooting at the edge of the lake, carrying out strictly following the script, which ends with the burning of most homes of the city. Hence the obligation to stage in continuity.
The arrival of the Stranger will change the habits of this small town whose population is composed only of adults - we do not see children - linked together by a collective criminal responsibility. Violating the one that caused, affecting an attitude weary face Belding's wife, the Stranger will humiliate the people he despises, without stripping them they can say anything and doing their scapegoat dwarf the sheriff of the place. As if the will of the destroying angel was not obvious enough, it will force them to paint their town red, the naming itself "Hell". Having killed his opponents whipping, hanging and Pistol, the Stranger will leave as he came in a mysterious halo. The unmarked grave in which lies the tortured body of Sheriff Duncan has a name ...
Playing on both the originality of the decor - each wall Lugo each house could be moved as required by the shooting - on the beauty of photography of Bruce Surtees, also adept at highlighting the red flames of the houses that destroy them at the end, and music - voluntarily and falsely inspired by Ennio Morricone,
Eastwood handles the humor and derision (dwarf and promoting dialogue between the Foreign and Mrs. Belding be seen), and fear the rise of violence, without ever indulging in the latter always justified and necessary. Rewriting the subject in its own way - the train whistle three times - the man alone, betrayed by a city and facing powerless, yet alone, in the off-the-law he wanted, the future filmmaker turns Pale Rider here the most troubling parable, a parable whose story is highlighted in red blood.
Patrick Brion.
Perfect World
1993, 2:15
With: Clint Eastwood, Kevin Kostner
During the kidnapping of a young boy by two escaped, one of two men discovered a paternal fiber.
is the story of a guy who was perfect in special education, but lack of pot life has been an offender. There is another guy who thinks he is a vigilante who is unalterable and a sheriff existential disarray. It is a police officer who gives birth to a melodrama about the painful and impossible filiation between males. Clint Eastwood became melancholy and sentimental, old age is the time it takes to make an accurate assessment of his mistakes. This Perfect World (1993) works as a mea culpa, critical look at its own character and causes espoused since Dirty Harry.
It is 1963, shortly before the assassination of JFK. A prisoner (Kevin Costner, very very good) escapes and takes a boy hostage. Eastwood, face weathered by age and bitterness, his eyes more and more depressed and distant, as caught by doubt, is conducting a manhunt that appears increasingly absurd, for n 'have no place. The child is in fact not in danger. The assumed gross and the innocent are found as father and son hand, lack of brothers anyway. The leak, in this case the protected area of a stolen car launched between past and future (the stops are dangerous, this is prohibited), their therapy is urgent, a daydream in the teeth of reality. Road movie, crazy vehicles (mobile home high tech bulky), repulsion / attraction between a macho and a female intelligent eastwoodienne detestation for boors of all kinds and unfathomable desire for redemption, neoclassicism attractive packaging is known. The trick here is an idea that the narrative structure and has both the virtues and the meaning of poetry. The confrontation between fugitives and pursuers is so remote it is ousted. Thus depriving themselves of any means to act, Eastwood locked in a sheriff's powerlessness that is about the film. It was easy to be a great avenger and inaccessible, it's another thing to protect kids two freewheel, so abandoned as they are stolen. this moral reckoning with himself and with the fucking American dream, the filmmaker filming only as a codicil stealth, but it is the issue that hovers over a perfect world and to remain so quiet until at outcome, gives the film its gentle weightlessness and allows them to welcome death as a new spring.
Isabelle Potel
Million Dollar Baby is needed very quickly as one of the vertices of a work made many short films that ambitious projects. We witnessing a miraculous synthesis of history and mythology, the perfect symbiosis between the bottom (a very nice script by Paul Haggis from news of FX Toole) and shape, whose contours are blurred respective superbly .
is a voiceover that opens the story and comment regularly, that of a narrator who rubs shoulders with the real main character, which one can say he shows great reluctance to get himself fully into the film. This voice is that of overhanging Eddie (Morgan Freeman), a former boxer became the handyman and friend of coach Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood), the reluctant hero. It tries to train future champions in his gym. There is an irrational caution: Frankie hesitated so long to hire a boxer in a championship he was stung by the most skilled business manager than him.
PASSING OF A SELF
The two men have so much of their lives behind them, at least they pretend to live with it. They no longer feel the tremors at a distance of a sport here transformed into a veritable metaphor for the action, as the vital principle and aesthetics, as a way to change his environment and to affirm its existence. Until Maggie makes irruption in Frankie lives. This meeting is straining the isolation and inertia of a man who spends his time reading poems by Yeats and trying to learn Gaelic. Maggie trains in his room and harassment to become his coach in an attempt to transcend its own condition. Now Dunn is reluctant as he feared that the stock price, who knows the burden of liberty, fearing that doing so is "being done". It objectively aging hero of a film by John Ford (a contemplative who does everything to avoid doing) to become one convicted of a Howard Hawks film (a technician who would know to serve a functionalism effective gestures and behaviors). Because the decision to lead the young woman will force the man to shoulder the responsibilities of his decision.
Million Dollar Baby is the first story of an apprenticeship, a transmission, also a filial relationship of substitution which gives the story an inevitable key psychological (Dunn became angry, many years ago, with his own daughter and he sends weekly letters that are inevitably returned). That is, a priori, a static diagram, that of a quest for victory, a transcendence according to the precepts of the same fiction Hollywood individualism, which seems to apply. Yet here, the path premeditated things, the laws of a story all the more determined he has taken his time to deploy (Maggie finally confronts an opponent for the world championship in Las Vegas) will experience a turning point sudden and unexpected. The disaster therefore questions the choice and consequences, action and danger, chance and moral responsibility. The melodramatic twist that is now tearing the film comes together, well beyond the vain concerns about the porosity of genres, the very nature of what is really exist a film character.
act, the hero of Million Dollar Baby, throw it in the world and expose it to light his young gifted boxing. The chiaroscuro contrasts and cut and carve the faces of the protagonists regularly remind us that the films Eastwood is constantly haunted by the prospect of a disappearance of the human face. This is the consequence of an inability to maintain the old stories. It is also an expression of anguish in the face of the obvious: there is no choice but action.
It has always been the driving force of American cinema, which has nurtured his mythological dimension as much as what determined the aesthetic model that has imposed the world. It certainly has been the subject of questioning when a certain modernity has touched Hollywood, but it remains the essential principle of fiction. It is in the action that the American hero is beyond any contingency. The film returns to Fitzgerald's phrase, quoted also highlighted by Bird, his biography of Charlie Parker, that "there is no second chance for an American hero." The main character in Million Dollar Baby experimenting with stoicism and resignation almost sublime metaphysical imperative, that of an "everything must be accomplished" religious confirms that this is absolutely obvious: for an American hero, be it done and do is be. Jean-François
Raug
It is 1963, shortly before the assassination of JFK. A prisoner (Kevin Costner, very very good) escapes and takes a boy hostage. Eastwood, face weathered by age and bitterness, his eyes more and more depressed and distant, as caught by doubt, is conducting a manhunt that appears increasingly absurd, for n 'have no place. The child is in fact not in danger. The assumed gross and the innocent are found as father and son hand, lack of brothers anyway. The leak, in this case the protected area of a stolen car launched between past and future (the stops are dangerous, this is prohibited), their therapy is urgent, a daydream in the teeth of reality. Road movie, crazy vehicles (mobile home high tech bulky), repulsion / attraction between a macho and a female intelligent eastwoodienne detestation for boors of all kinds and unfathomable desire for redemption, neoclassicism attractive packaging is known. The trick here is an idea that the narrative structure and has both the virtues and the meaning of poetry. The confrontation between fugitives and pursuers is so remote it is ousted. Thus depriving themselves of any means to act, Eastwood locked in a sheriff's powerlessness that is about the film. It was easy to be a great avenger and inaccessible, it's another thing to protect kids two freewheel, so abandoned as they are stolen. this moral reckoning with himself and with the fucking American dream, the filmmaker filming only as a codicil stealth, but it is the issue that hovers over a perfect world and to remain so quiet until at outcome, gives the film its gentle weightlessness and allows them to welcome death as a new spring.
Isabelle Potel
Million Dollar Baby
2004, 2:12
With: Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman
boxing coach Frankie Dunn is back in action when the young Maggie Fitzgerald pushes the door of his gym.
Million Dollar Baby is needed very quickly as one of the vertices of a work made many short films that ambitious projects. We witnessing a miraculous synthesis of history and mythology, the perfect symbiosis between the bottom (a very nice script by Paul Haggis from news of FX Toole) and shape, whose contours are blurred respective superbly .
is a voiceover that opens the story and comment regularly, that of a narrator who rubs shoulders with the real main character, which one can say he shows great reluctance to get himself fully into the film. This voice is that of overhanging Eddie (Morgan Freeman), a former boxer became the handyman and friend of coach Frankie Dunn (Clint Eastwood), the reluctant hero. It tries to train future champions in his gym. There is an irrational caution: Frankie hesitated so long to hire a boxer in a championship he was stung by the most skilled business manager than him.
PASSING OF A SELF
The two men have so much of their lives behind them, at least they pretend to live with it. They no longer feel the tremors at a distance of a sport here transformed into a veritable metaphor for the action, as the vital principle and aesthetics, as a way to change his environment and to affirm its existence. Until Maggie makes irruption in Frankie lives. This meeting is straining the isolation and inertia of a man who spends his time reading poems by Yeats and trying to learn Gaelic. Maggie trains in his room and harassment to become his coach in an attempt to transcend its own condition. Now Dunn is reluctant as he feared that the stock price, who knows the burden of liberty, fearing that doing so is "being done". It objectively aging hero of a film by John Ford (a contemplative who does everything to avoid doing) to become one convicted of a Howard Hawks film (a technician who would know to serve a functionalism effective gestures and behaviors). Because the decision to lead the young woman will force the man to shoulder the responsibilities of his decision.
Million Dollar Baby is the first story of an apprenticeship, a transmission, also a filial relationship of substitution which gives the story an inevitable key psychological (Dunn became angry, many years ago, with his own daughter and he sends weekly letters that are inevitably returned). That is, a priori, a static diagram, that of a quest for victory, a transcendence according to the precepts of the same fiction Hollywood individualism, which seems to apply. Yet here, the path premeditated things, the laws of a story all the more determined he has taken his time to deploy (Maggie finally confronts an opponent for the world championship in Las Vegas) will experience a turning point sudden and unexpected. The disaster therefore questions the choice and consequences, action and danger, chance and moral responsibility. The melodramatic twist that is now tearing the film comes together, well beyond the vain concerns about the porosity of genres, the very nature of what is really exist a film character.
act, the hero of Million Dollar Baby, throw it in the world and expose it to light his young gifted boxing. The chiaroscuro contrasts and cut and carve the faces of the protagonists regularly remind us that the films Eastwood is constantly haunted by the prospect of a disappearance of the human face. This is the consequence of an inability to maintain the old stories. It is also an expression of anguish in the face of the obvious: there is no choice but action.
It has always been the driving force of American cinema, which has nurtured his mythological dimension as much as what determined the aesthetic model that has imposed the world. It certainly has been the subject of questioning when a certain modernity has touched Hollywood, but it remains the essential principle of fiction. It is in the action that the American hero is beyond any contingency. The film returns to Fitzgerald's phrase, quoted also highlighted by Bird, his biography of Charlie Parker, that "there is no second chance for an American hero." The main character in Million Dollar Baby experimenting with stoicism and resignation almost sublime metaphysical imperative, that of an "everything must be accomplished" religious confirms that this is absolutely obvious: for an American hero, be it done and do is be. Jean-François
Raug
